production of heterogeneous space
A colourful neighbourhood in Dresden, Germany Kristian Garthus Buer
Master thesis at the faculty of social sciences, institute for social anthropology
UNIVERSITY OF OSLO
21.05.2007
Abstract
My thesis is an exploration of cultural life in the city part Äussere Neustadt in Dresden, capital of the former East German state Saxony. The city part hosts a lively and youthful scene of a range of subcultural practices and lifestyles that, in local and emic discourses, are broadly termed as “alternative”. Although strongly interwoven with the dissenting youth movements in the west in the 1960s/-70s, vast systems of
“alternative” signification have developed, and today “alternative culture” circulates as a global cultural conception thanks to the development of transnational mediation technologies. I presuppose, though, that “alternative” culture only makes sense to real, living and sensing human beings when embedded in local life worlds. Thus, the thesis seeks to illustrate various ways by which the “alternative culture”-idea is made real through practices of ‘locality production’ (Appadurai 1996), that is, in social forms of remembering and co-memorating local history, in neighbourhood festival- spectacles, in amateur art-practices, such as street art and musical jamming, and in various ‘carenvalesque’ (Bakhtin 1968) street parades.
I furthermore discuss the broader implications ideas and practices “alternative”
culture have on the organisation of urban spaces, treating them as vehicles of cultural heterogenisation (Hannerz 1992). The thesis refers to such particular localities where social systems are integrated through the cultivation of ideas and practices of sociocultural dissent, a phenomenon that is especially relevant in modern urban situations. The field case is used as an example in a discussion of why such localities are produced, and how they persist, in spite of housing highly transitory populations.
I argue that the key factor is the investment of sociocultural dissent as an imagined substance of the locality itself. Thus, place is presented as the prime referential medium by which processes of shaping and reproducing stable relationships of meaning and identity are mediated.
Thanks to my friends in Äussere Neustadt who so graciously opened their lives to me, to my supervisor Iver for invaluable guidance, and to family, friends, and my dear Susi
for support and love.
Content
ABSTRACT...2
CONTENT...4
LIST OF FIGURES ...6
INTRODUCTION ...7
SKETCHING THE FIELD...7
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL FORMAT...9
BRIEF CONTEMPLATIONS ON TOILS AND FRUITS OF RESISTANCE...12
CHAPTER I: CONTEXTS ...14
HISTORICAL CONTOURS AND POST-WENDE SENSES OF PLACE...14
DEMOGRAPHIC FEATURES...19
ON METHODS AND POSITIONING IN THE FIELD...21
CHAPTER II: HISTORIES OF ÄUSSERE NEUSTADT ...25
BITTER-SWEET RESISTANCE AND THE BIRTH OF AN ORIGIN MYTH...27
MANAGING A MYTH.A GRASS ROOT NGO. ...31
Discrediting the grand historical narrative – For whom is history written? ...33
BRN-AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORICAL CELEBRATION...35
Seasonal inversions ...36
A-MUSEAL REMEMBERING...39
SOCIO-LOCAL MNEMONIC PROCESS...41
CHAPTER III: A COUNTER-ACTIVE ‘IDEOSCAPE’...43
SHAPING THE SELF AS AN ‘OTHER’ ...45
Locating alternativism at global, national, regional and local intersections...51
A RUPTURED ALTERNA(I)TIVITY...57
Kneipenboom – Blooming creativity or commercial usurpation? ...58
COLOUR.POETICS AND POLITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM...64
THE TWIN-ETHOSES OF DIFFERENCE AND DIVERSITY...68
CHAPTER IV: SOCIOSPATIAL TRANSGRESSIONS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS...70
ARCHITECTURE AS CANVAS FOR PUBLIC ANTI-ART...72
Photographic examples of local street art...77
ENTER THE JAM...78
The contours of a grass root jammers’ network ...79
The presence of a neighbourhood mystic ...83
Jamming - a localising sociocultural practice ...87
SPATIAL JAMMING...92
CHAPTER V: CARNIVALESQUE SUBVERSION ...95
MOCKING THE TRADITIONAL CARNIVAL...98
COLOURED CACOPHONY...103
STATE PARADE COMEDY...107
Mickey Mouse the mediator...110
CARNIVALESQUE PLAY –A SOURCE OF LOCAL EMPOWERMENT? ...118
CHAPTER VI: WRAPPING UP AND LOOKING OUT ...121
CONCLUSIONS AND INSIGHTS GAINED...121
POSSIBLE COMPARATIVE EXITS...125
REFERENCES ...129
List of Figures
Figure I: The semantic reciprocity of interactional “alternative” sign-media...49
Figure II: The structurally transgenetic grotesque symbol...116 Figure III: The dynamic structural transgenesis of the BRN-flag...117
Introduction
Sketching the field
“The world is too round to sit still in a corner.”
- Poster in a window of an umsonst Laden1 in Äussere Neustadt, Dresden
During summer holiday travels in eastern Germany in June 2005 my German girlfriend and I made a visit to Dresden, the capital of the province Saxony. Once the home of a grandiose baroque royalty, later a booming industrial town, Dresden suffered greatly from WWII bombardment and the neglect of history in socialist city management. After the German reunion in 1990, however, and mainly due to its unforgotten fame as “the Florence of die Elbe”, Dresden has received considerable funding, from both state and private investors, directed towards restoring and preserving its position as a European cultural metropolis. We were, thus, mainly interested in its widely advertised baroque monuments, such as the pleasure palace Zwinger, the Semper opera and the Frauenkirch. The latter of these was by that time famous due to the action of Dresden's citizen who, over 15 years, and funded by private donations, had restored it from all but a WWII-demolished rubble to a church of baroque glory.
Via hearsay, we had been recommended to seek accommodations in Neustadt (“Newtown”) north of the river, somewhat off the charter tour-infested old town area, and a place that was supposed to be more popular with younger people. In our tour guide we were further intrigued by descriptions such as “[The Neustadt neighbourhoods] pulse with the lively energy of Dresden's young alternative scene”
1 A shop where all articles are donated redundant second hand articles and are redistributed for free. The freeshop business idea is based on anti-capitalist and recycling idealism.
and, “It seems like the entire Neustadt spends the day anticipating 10pm. Ten years ago (...) [it] was a maze of grey streets lined with tired, crumbling buildings. Now a spontaneous, alternative community has sprung up in the 50 bars crammed into the square kilometre (...)” (Attanutcci 2004:159,168). Making our way to the backpacker hostel Lollis Homestay, recommended by our guidebook, we dropped “the snail room”, “the “3D-wonderland room” and “the water bubble room” in favour of “the Egyptian room”, where we found the walls warmly decorated in brown/yellow/orange desert landscapes displaying motifs of pyramids, Pharaohs and Egyptian mythology. Accepting an offer from our young, long-haired host, we borrowed a couple of old and rusty bikes and set off through the narrow, cobble- stoned streets that sprawl between the many blocks of graffiti-plastered, Bismarck- age buildings that dominate the area, and which are now and then punctuated by locally designed play grounds. Along the way we passed many small retail shops variably fronting trendy urban clothes, books, locally manufactured handicrafts, vinyl records and water pipes, a range of gastronomic establishments - for example Turkish, Afghan, Iraqi, Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, African, US, Irish and Italian kitchens - as well as various small bars, clubs, concert places and cafés.
Making a break, we found our way into the small, lush backyard of the café Planwirtschaft (“planned economy”) where we could savor dishes made from regional agricultural bio-produce and take our pick from 20 kinds of oriental tea sorts.
Through our days in Dresden, we thus came to know that its baroque image was but a small part of its face, and that beneath the “high” culture sported in brochures and on postcards, there also existed a bustling, local cultural scene which had markedly little connection to its wider reputation. The peak of this realization came as we were about to leave the city for a few days in Prague, when our host strongly advised us to remain over the weekend, as it happened to be the time for the yearly local festival Bunte Republik Neustadt (“colourful republic New Town”). Deciding to stay, we were surprised to see how Neustadt’s streets suddenly turned into a huge festival area, comprising outdoor rock concert stages; techno music dance floors; beer stalls;
cocktail-bars; stalls selling various pastries, snacks and small dishes; fairs where peddlers sold ethnic crafts, batik clothing and other small wares; flea markets;
installations made by artist cooperatives; various local idealist NGO advertisement stalls; theatre– and– clown– stalls for children; various wandering entertainers and jugglers; jovial costumed parades; collectively organized street-breakfasts and so forth. All in all we learned that the humdrum of the BRN attracted, in total, close to 200 000 young people from the city proper, other parts of Germany and even from abroad. My experience of the area, capped by the witnessing of this event, made it clear to me that it was the site of a peculiar, flourishing cultural life, thereby awakening a curiosity to pierce through the immediacy of the tourist gaze impression and investigate the causes and traits of this cultural abundance.
An anthropological format
In this study, cultural expression serves as the basic point of inquiry through which a broader understanding of the features of human life in Äussere Neustadt is sought.
Furthermore, I treat cultural expression as a means by which space can be conceptualized and delineated into distinct places to the extent that it condenses the signification of such expressions. I thereby understand Äussere Neustadt in a sosiosemantic way, that is, as a place which comprises the interrelation of its topographic and geographic features, the cultural practices taking place there, as well as any discursive practice referring to it. This stance is inspired by writers such as Chris Tilley (1994) and Arjun Appadurai (1996), of whom the latter is also concerned with the peculiar ways in which space and cultural practice are interrelated under the conditions of late modernity and the forces globalization. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson claim that: “The irony of these times (...) is that as actual places and localities become more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become perhaps even more salient.” (Gupta & Ferguson 1992:10). In a world where an intensified flow of people, capital, commodities and cultural ideas and images challenges the boundaries of place, a means to cope is to defend and
produce place-distinctiveness through the active and affective involvement that cultural practice is.
Conceptualizing cultural practice as a strategy for prevailing in a struggle over space must, however, be moderated, as it easily leads to the reduction of cultural expressions to mere inversions a hegemonic ‘other’. More recent resistance-literature tends to lean on neo-Marxist inspired theories of the fine grained, de-institutionalized dynamics of power in social fields, such as for example the everyday forms of power in discourse discussed by Michel Foucault (for example 1978) or James Scott’s illumination of everyday forms of resistance and hidden transcripts (1985). In spite of the unquestionable value of these and other related works, Michael F. Brown warns us that “(...) a myopic focus on resistance (...) can easily blind us to zones of complicity and (...) of sui generis creativity.” (Brown 1996:733). Thus, even though this analysis engages a field where cultural life flourishes with explicitly critical political references, reducing these to mere reflexes of hegemony is a gross undervaluation. Although the manifestation of culture was, as we shall see, in many cases propelled by a dialectic towards an ‘other’ that was envisioned as structurally more powerful, I am just as much concerned to show that their unfolding also abided to various other, equally important dynamics, such as striving for senses of belonging, the affective experience of communal celebration, the will to creative imagination and the thrills of transformation and transcendence.
To avoid the various connotations inflicted upon resistance-studies by recent academic discourse, I rather label many cultural phenomena described in this study as a forms of cultural ‘dissent’, a term which both incorporates reactive and creative dynamics and avoids to overstate the significance clear-cut, homologous and hegemonic ‘other’s. Thus, I follow the invitation from Ulf Hannerz to conceptualize complex field sites in terms of ‘homogeneity’ versus ‘heterogeneity’ (Hannerz 1992), and my particular focus is on the social dynamics of a field in which a marked cultural heterogeneity is at display. To give this cultural heterogeneity a spatial dimension, I suggest that it can be fruitfully understood as a ‘heterotopia’ (Foucault 1967). By this term, Foucault pointed to heterogeneous sites as anchoring points for a
multiple set of spaces, each incompatible with the others. Some examples he gave were cinemas, theatres, gardens, zoos, museums, circuses and folk-festivals. I suggest that ‘heterotopia’ has relevance for any site that displays relatively intense heterogeneous features, for example, as in our case, culturally diverse neighbourhoods. Within macro-societal spaces, Foucault conceptualised heterotopia as micro-cosmoses of society, encompassing, representing and mirroring various societal super-structures, thus also being generic sites of structural transformation.
The thesis explores how Äussere Neustadt can be seen as pole of cultural creativity, trend innovation, identity transformation and political opposition within the space of Dresden.
In the following pages, I examine various examples of how counter-culturalism is manifested in both the minds and practices of Äussere Neustadt inhabitants and I explore how these manifestations work to define it as a distinct, meaningful place.
Some overarching research questions are: How do ideas and cultural practices merge to produce shared sense of place? Why have counter-culturalist ethoses and worldviews come to such significance in this particular locality? How is a local brand of counter-culturalism created, reproduced and transformed? In what ways do the particular histories that conjoin in Äussere Neustadt impact on its contemporary meaning and cultural life? To which extent are the counter-cultural phenomena occurring in the area products of counter-hegemonic struggles? And correspondingly, to what extent can they be said to be products of internal dynamics? Which are these?
Finally, the thesis suggests a broader scope of comparison, concluding in a discussion of how the case of Äussere Neustadt might be of value when examining other urban spaces of counter-culture. Are there areas of other cities which have significant similarities to Äussere Neustadt, and, if so, which? Why do counter-culturalized spaces occur and remain within many contemporary urban settings? Do they have particular functions for the unfolding of human life within the conditions of late modern urban settings? What might such functions be?
The next chapter accounts for some of the more general historical and demographical features of the field, as well as my own particular engagement within it. It also
includes a discussion of methodical challenges and how these were addressed. In chapter two, local history is readdressed from an emic point of view to illustrate how a counter-culturalist discourse usurps local historical imagination. Chapter three outlines the topographies of a local landscape of ideas and values in a discussion of the ways these interrelate to local cultural practices, as well as to senses of place.
Chapter four discusses two examples of local art practice. These show how counter- culturalist ideas and values are incorporated into engaged aesthetic subjects, and consequently how they also become grounded into the very matter of the city. In chapter five, three different cases of public ritual are treated as examples of how the discussed ideas and values reproduce through feats of collective, cultural performances.
Brief contemplations on toils and fruits of resistance
“Indeed it is painful when buds burst,
painful both for what grows and what constraints.”
- Karin Boye, from the poem “Indeed it is painful when buds burst”
At the heart of this study lies a genuine respect and fascination for the creative capacity of human life. Through my study of cultural life in Äussere Neustadt, I was struck by how it seemed to inhere an insistence to unfold in a myriad of shapes and forms. Later anthropological studies of marginalization tend to conceptualize the marginalized as disempowered subjects, supplementing their analysises with calls for justice. In many cases, such perspectives are just and appropriate. Nevertheless, I encourage the reader of this work to condone any victimizing associations, instead focusing on the flourishing life which sociocultural marginalisation can bring about.
Across the world, insistence on difference is a central driving force of the boundlessness of cultural innovation. Often, this insistence intensifies under
conditions of pressure. Thus, expansions of cultural creativity are often rooted in situations of power disjuncture.
Without understating the need for a politically engaged anthropology, I hope that this study can contribute to a style of studying sociocultural marginalization-phenomena that has a less pessimistic perspective. This requires a shift of focus from the pains and grievances that the subjects of marginalization experience to a more fine-grained scrutiny of the dynamics inherent in the ways and strategies they develop to meet, process and overcome their disempowered positions. Neo-Marxist and post-colonial anthropology has at times lost sight of the positive, generative effects power struggles have on cultural production, mainly due to a cultural pessimism regarding the forces of globalisation, and to an overt fixation on oppression and victimization. Developing a constructive anthropological focus on the resilience of creativity in processes of coping with domination is a means to encourage and empower efforts developed by marginalized actors themselves. It furthermore reconnects to the classical disciplinary respect and fascination towards the multiplicity and freshness of the ever-expanding flux of human cultural life.
Chapter I: Contexts
This chapter provides some of the most significant historical and demographical circumstances influencing contemporary Äussere Neustadt, giving the empirical narratives and cases described in the following chapters contextual ground. These general circumstances lead on to a discussion of my concrete, methodological engagement in the field, that is, my choice of informants and arenas of interaction, the problems that the field posed to the use of anthropological research methods, how these problems were resolved, and the type and analytical scope of the data produced.
Historical contours and post-Wende senses of place
“Äussere Neustadt is not a city part like the others.
To German order-fanatics it’s an abomination, to nostalgics a balm, to politicians a problem or a nuisance, magnet for travel bureaus, journalists and speculators, to many – accordingly – too loud or too quiet, trouble spot, adventure playground, boulevard, battlefield, biotope, reservation, ruin, grid square, object of desire. For many, (...) Äussere Neustadt is quite unsentimentally Heimat.”
- Gregor Kunz, first and only BRN-monarch,
from an article in the local street magazine Anton, 1991
Although archaeologists have found traces of human settlement dating back several thousand years on the sandy northern bank of the river Elbe that today is called Neustadt, I will here refer to the most recent 300 years during which Neustadt became an integrated part of the city of Dresden.
In 1701, Dresden’s epic, baroque king, August the strong, whilst ruling a Saxon kingdom in bloom, sanctioned settlement on the north side of the river. About 100 years later the settlement had grown from a commercial outpost to a town in its own right, and was formally included in Dresden, acquiring the name Atonstadt (Jauslin 1997). Throughout the 19th century it saw extensive industrial development, as Dresden became a strong dynamo in the industrialization of Bismarck-Germany. As in many other German cities, its contemporary architecture mainly stems from the late 19th century Bismarck-era (popularly called die Gründerzeit), a time marked by socio-political stability and booming economic growth. The streets are lined with 4-5 storey buildings, preferring spacey backyards over broad plazas, forming a grid-work of narrow alleys (Blockrandbebauung). Style-wise, the buildings resound with the neo-romantic and avant-garde architectural fashions prevalent during the Bismarck period.
Due to its drawn back location on the north side of the river, the area, especially the northernmost rim, escaped the bombings of the WWII largely unscathed. It was around this time that the name Neustadt and the differentiation between an “outer”
(Äussere), northernmost part, and an “inner” (Innere) part was established. Due to the vast destruction of the old town area, the name “new town” is somehow misleading, as most of its contemporary structures are older than the now restored old town. After the WWII, Dresden was incorporated in the Soviet occupation zone, which later on developed into the German Democratic Republic (GDR), East Germany.
Rather than pursuing renovation and restoration, the GDR-state sponsored the construction of modern, Eastern-Block-style block-buildings (Plattenbauten), whilst leaving areas such as Äussere Neustadt for gradual decay. In the 1970s and 80s, like in many other Gründerzeit-quarters in GDR cities, the advanced state of decay, and the availability of housing with modern sanitary facilities elsewhere urged many residents to move away. Due to lack of funds to renovate the old buildings, as well as the socialist ideological preference for modern architecture, in the 1980s the city council decided to level large parts of the area and supplant it with Plattenbauten.
However, funding issues caused these to be indeterminately suspended. Meanwhile,
the opening up of empty housing had attracted an erratic, disorganized, and partially illegal resettlement by groups of young, intellectual and bohemian people. These had grown up under the moderation of control on cultural policies under Honecker during the 1970s (Urbank 34:2004). Like many German intellectuals of the day, they nurtured a romanticised sense of Gründerzeit-architecture, and protecting the area became a cause of opposition to the GDR-authorities. The first phase of gentrifying the neighbourhood had been entered, as various middle-class agents had started replacing the former working classes.
In the summer of 1989, a group of local activists formed “die Interessen Gemeinschaft Äussere Neustadt”2, a civil grass-root organization dedicated to halting the razing plans and encouraging modern renovation instead (Urbank 2004:35). In the tumults following die Wende that occurred in the autumn of the same year, IG ÄN was able to get these plans dismissed, and the area was subsequently, formally established as an area of sanitation. The massive sanitary upgrading of the area which followed over the next decade was largely funded by private, in many cases West- German capital, as the real estate was mostly privatized.
In the summer of 1990, inhabitants loosely associated by way of a leftist political scene, organized a festival which has become a peak event in the local historical consciousness. Under the title “Bunte Republik Neustadt”, translating “Colourful Republic New Town”, an important foundational stone was laid in the architecture of a local counter-culture (this event is discussed further in chapter 2). The initials BRN did in themselves represent a satiric protest against the newly reunited German state, the BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschlands). BRN has been celebrated in early summer every year thereafter, and from being a small event mainly by and for the local inhabitants, it has, in the later years, attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors.
As the sanitation and privatization, as well as the growth of the BRN-festival indicates, as the local space has been liberalized, post-Wende Äussere Neustadt has
2 “The intrest assosciation of Äussere Neustadt”.
gentrified rapidly. Its contemporary, widespread reputation as a Kneipenviertel (“pub/bar/café-quarter”) stems from a steady growth in the number of gastronomic enterprises that has both fuelled, and become fuelled by its increasingly popular hype.
The prototypical Neustädter Kneipen were established in Wende-days. These were small, illegal establishments that combined the serving of drinks and light foods with some form of artistic aspiration. An early example was the popular Gallery-Café “die Bronxx”, where the owner had hired a professional artist to paint the interior in flourishing colours (Urbank 2004:52). Throughout the following decade, the number of gastronomies increased from a bare dozen to more than a hundred. Simultaneously, a varied retail market has cropped up, comprising various clothing stores of urban, alternative and exotic styles, head shops, record stores, tattoo studios, hairdressers, book shops and so forth. Although most of these new places attempt to connect to the
“enterprise/art”-style lain down by the early Kneipen, the development has been met with ambivalent reactions, as many are seen as exploiting the authentic flair of the area for the sake of commercial profit. Today, the masses of people who come to the area to explore its gastronomic and cultural life can navigate it by the help of a range of nightlife-guides and Kneipen-surfers.
Since 1990, increased sympathies for rightist political groups have led to Äussere Neustadt also experiencing sparks of the rising tensions between leftist and rightist radical political groups in post-Wende Eastern Germany. One example is the aforementioned “die Bronxx”, which, on the new years night 1990/91, was completely burned out after being set on fire by rightist radicals (Urbank 2004:52).
Such groups have also attempted to stage provocative marches through the area. In some of the recent BRN-celebrations, there have been a few incidents of open clashes between rightist and leftist groups, also involving considerable police forces. A result has been an increased policing of the area, especially around the BRN. A general malcontent expressed by certain inhabitants, regarding the unrest and litter that the increased commerce and night life has brought along, has led to regulations on the opening hours of gastronomies. Currently there is an ongoing discussion as to whether surveillance cameras should be installed in the area, due to a few episodes of violence as last summer between visiting drunken youngsters and the police.
Through a diachronic study of various local and extra-local print media, Urbank has distilled a set of typical images circulating the discourse of the area. She shows a shift in popular opinions throughout the 1990s. In the early and middle years of the last decade it was dominated by images such as “scruffy-quarter”, “threatened quarter”,
“island” and “tumult-quarter”. These have since evolved gradually into today’s images: “contrast-quarter”, “quarter with a special flair”, “colourful quarter” and
“Kneipen – and – amusement quarter” (Urbank 2004: 44-48). Thus there has been a shift in the general public discourse from viewing Äussere Neustadt as an area of disturbance, danger and obscurity to an area of the exoticism, plurality and fun.
However, an image that has been cultivated and reproduced throughout the whole post-Wende epoch is that of “a quarter with a special identity”. As one informant tellingly informed me, “Neustadt is a city within the city”. The processes of gentrification, social and cultural pluralisation and commercialization are intertwined in strong tendencies to mythologize the area, constructing it as a place of difference relative to the larger city context.
Demographic features
“The average Dresden-Tourist: 57 years - consumer, hot dog, Zwinger and naturally the most beautiful brewery in Germany3, could be the father or mother of the typical Neustadt inhabitant: 32 years
- producer, Döner4, shisha5, art and beats and/or radicalized activist.”
- From the Neustadter satirical street magazine Der Knüller6
Considering its centuries-long tradition of bustling commerce and industry, a mixed demography is not new to Äussere Neustadt. Throughout history, it has variably been home to shop-owners and merchants, aristocrats and bourgeoisie, industrialists and land-owners, workers of blue and white collars, craftsmen and artists, as well as various sociocultural dissidents. Nevertheless, the particular conditions of a decaying Gründerzeit-architecture and an increasing vacancy in the years prior to die Wende, the subsequent sanitary upgrading and the return of the Gründerzeit-style to fashion and the following intensified immigration, have produced the special demographic features of contemporary Äussere Neustadt.
With nearly 14000 inhabitants housed within roughly one square kilometre, it is the most densely populated part of the city7. It also has the highest number of foreigners,
3 The brewery of the internationally acclaimed beer Radeberger, so self-titled in commercial rhetoric.
4 A cheap Turkish fast-food dish, typically lamb meat wrapped in bread with a spicy sauce.
5 Arab style water pipe.
6 “The blockbuster”.
7 This number, as well as the following statistical information, is extracted from the database of Landeshauptstadt Dresden (2006) (http://www.dresden.de/de/02/040_Statistik.php).
as 8.3% of the inhabitants are foreign citizens (as opposed to the total city average of 4%). The majority of its population are between 20 and 40 years of age, with an average of 32.1 years, lower than any other part of Dresden. The average period of residence is 4.38 years, indicating an intense flow of people in and out of the area.
More than 70% of the residents live in single-apartment-households, of which a considerable portion is presumed to be Wohngemeinschäfte (single flats where several people live together, sharing the rental costs). The unemployment rate, currently hovering around 11%, is somewhat lower than the total city average, which lies just above 15%. A gross employment rate of 43% indicates that a good portion of Äussere Neustadt’s residents are in the process of education. That nearly 70% of the adult residents are registered as singles strengthens the picture of a youthful, cosmopolitan and liberal environment. As of political sympathies, in the latest ballots of the 2004 regional elections, the majority of votes were shared between the Greens (die Grünen) and the Social Democrats (SPD), with the Greens slightly ahead. The broad sympathy for the Greens and their environmentalist politics is a special trait of the Äussere Neustadt population, as the Greens tend to be a minority party in most other areas.
The pluralisation of Äussere Neustadt through the massive popularization following die Wende, easily renders superficial any attempts to generalize its contemporary appearance and composition beyond the mere statistical facts. A surging social flux makes the area a highly heterogeneous environment, a heterogeneity which in itself is widely celebrated as a signifier of local distinctiveness. A stroll through the area confirms its reputation as a quarter with a specially vibrant life, a place which houses a wide range of people of whom agreeably can be fitted into the labels “alternative“
and “colourful”.
On methods and positioning in the field
How is it possible to approach such a complex, large-scale, dynamic and heterogeneous field as an anthropologist researcher? From the beginning it was clear that, although I wished to use the concrete city part as a geographical frame for my study, I would not within the scope of a half years fieldwork manage to produce an exhaustive, cross-sectional account of the array of social and cultural worlds manifesting in the daily lives across the area. Thus, to study the interrelations between agents, practices and place I had to limit myself to a particular selection of informants whom I evaluated to hold a certain representativeness as to how such interrelations were produced more generally in the area. This study is therefore first and foremost made in rather than of the city (Southall 1998:7), although the analysis also suggests some more general perspectives on the urban dynamics reflecting in the case material. In this respect it flows into the broad tradition of community studies in urban anthropology.
Quickly spotting “alternative” and “colourful” as key emic concepts, both in relation to place and selves, I set out to find a group of informants whom I deemed had a personal engagement with these. I ended up living together with two students in their early 20s in a WG in the centre of the city part, whom, upon questions, expressed an affinitive perception of a local “alternative” culture, and whose self-painted, rainbow- coloured kitchen in it self was a telling tale of their identification with a homely colourfulness. As many other young students in the area, they had moved in from smaller towns in the region within the last couple of years, abandoning life as adolescents in their middle-class families to start an independent urban life as students at the city university. Both had affinities for arts, one being a student of landscape architecture, the other an amateur bass player. Through these two I got acquainted to their loose network of peers and started participating in their everyday activities, such as informal homely leisure gatherings, at street-corners, in parks, in clubs and so forth. Within these networks, and as a consequence of my own skills as a
guitar player I got deep access to a local network of amateur musicians, which allowed me to participate in various practice/jam-sessions and public musical performances. Although my informants were well aware of my role as a researcher, the fact that I achieved the roles as a guitar player and fellow explorer of the cultural amusements in the area gave me access to many informal, backstage arenas. The outcome is a rich variety of data of my informants’ everyday lives, involving consumption patterns, social and cultural practices, and ideal and moral discourses.
Insights were gained through prolonged, empathic interaction, involving the co- experience of the problems, joys, constraints and opportunities that flavoured and gave direction to their life-worlds.
Beyond this primary circle of informants I attended various local public events, such as meetings organized by idealistic, political and religious groups, openings of art exhibitions, concerts, street parades, and city festivals. Although I strived for deep participation also in these arenas, my position was more observational, as deep participation in social fields relies upon closer, more tediously built relations to the contexts and the people within them. Therefore, understandings of the more emotional, intuitive aspects these events might suffer weaknesses. Broad written accounts and photographic material, nevertheless, provide a rich, supplementary basis for sociocultural interpretation of these events.
I furthermore established a secondary informant circle constituted by a set of people whom I saw as somehow having a deeper, more direct and elaborated relationship to Äussere Neustadt. These included activists in local grass root organisations, local artists, owners of/workers in particular clubs and pubs, organisers of various neighbourhood events, festivals and museums, long time street personalities and so forth. These people I judge as various local ‘cultural specialists'. (Turner 1964:21).
Supplementing my day to day interaction with these various informants are several informal interviews, directly addressing their thoughts and relationships to the city part and its cultural life.
Aside from informant interaction, I spent much time exploring the material appearances of the city part, building up broad written accounts, as well as extensive photographic material of architecture, streetscapes, street art and a choice of significant sites, such as parks, backyards, street corners, city squares, clubs, concert arenas, museums, churches etc. Evaluations of their significance was based on their appearing significance to my informants, as well as their importance in larger local discourses and practices. Belonging to this data-bulk is also a mass of printed material, such as flyers, pamphlets, postcards, stickers, calendars, photo-books, tourist-guides, newspaper articles, city magazines, historical documents and so forth, as well as internet material, such as the web profiles of local institutions and blogs on local issues.
In sum, I was able to build up an empirical base marked by the distinctive depth of the anthropological gaze, yet also holding a relatively wide horizon. In it, both fields of variation and fields of comparation are reflected (Barth 1999). The study does not pretend to fully account for all the social and cultural phenomena of Äussere Neustadt, nor does it attempt to present some exhaustive truth about it. First of all, the mass of events and people passing through the field was far too voluminous for one anthropological observer to record through a half years fieldwork. Secondly, many of these events are vastly affected by relations spanning into various extra-local geographical and cultural realms, leaving presentations of local cultural life as exclusively contained and maintained by integral connections bluntly inaccurate. Just as other late modern settings affected by the expansion of mass mediation and the increasing flows of people, things and ideas across borders, Äussere Neustadt remains an open and multiply contested site. Still, I believe I have managed to explore and understand significant circumstances of the peculiar reputation and cultural life of the area. The embedding of my primary informants is typical for many of its inhabitants:
People with young, middle-class rural/suburban backgrounds, having lived in the area for up to a few years, aspiring to higher degree education and having amateur involvements in practices of art. Moreover, I assume that several of my secondary circle informants, through their broad and lasting commitment to the area, incorporate
its cultural and ideal characteristics in a profound sense. Together, all these empirical intakes provide a multi-perspectival observational ground for further analysis.
Ulf Hannerz has suggested that one way to study complex fields such as cities is to identify and examine forces of homogenization and heterogenisation (Hannerz 1992).
Äussere Neustadt, a field reverberant with counter-cultural practices, can be considered a place where this struggle is relatively intense and visible. In my fieldwork I have minded how various trans-local, homogenetic forces inflicted the lives of neighbourhood residents, and which effects they produced within their life- worlds. Thus, my observations bear witness to how contemporary societal heterogenisation manifests in the practices of everyday urban lives.
Chapter II: Histories of Äussere Neustadt
“Every day of German history is one day to much!”
- Leftist slogan spray painted on a building in the city part
In the year of 2006 Landeshauptstadt Dresden arranged for a major historical celebration of its achievement of formal status as a city in 1206. The event was widely advertised under the label Dresden 800, and was supported by a broad variety of partners ranging from local bourgeoisie NGOs such as Dresdner Geschichtsverein e.V. (Dresden History union) to national commercial enterprises, such as Rheingas Handel GmbH & Co (a German energy giant based in the Rhine area). The hope that such a grandiose historical advertisement would increase the market value of the city, thereby stimulating local industries and attracting more visitors and capital, was an uncontroversial argument in public discourses of the event. Official advertising was dominated by a call for city inhabitants to join in the fest (“party”) and to play a role in shaping the future identity of Dresden. A series of projects were staged throughout the year, such as festivals of classical music, open air pop-concerts, public lectures and literature readings, medieval markets, parades, firework shows and photo contests.
Upon entering the field, one of my ambitions was to examine how this celebration was conducted locally in Äussere Neustadt, producing an analysis informed by recent theories of the relationships between embodied history, memory and sociality. A base recognition in such theory is that history is variably conceptualized across social groups, that is, history is seen as a process whereby groups embedded in specific social and historical contexts narrate particular histories through collective practices of remembering. From post-socialist literature on the former GDR, particularly from Elisabeth A. Ten Dyke’s study of the intersecting memory works of GDR-era Dresden in the lives of local inhabitants in the post-Wende 1990s (Dyke 2001), I had
learned that die Wende would be a particularly important reference point. Arriving and settling in the field I was disappointed to find that the 800-years celebration was rather tepidly received in Äussere Neustadt. The official logo appeared erratically in the local newspaper die Neustadt, usually featuring random micro-historical narratives from the city archives. I also observed it at a few concerts, mainly during the BRN-festival (see below). However, the impression I got through participating in the local everyday life was that the majority of the inhabitants remained largely ignorant of the whole spectacle. In the lives and practices of my informants it seemed a non-topic. When any reference was made, it was usually limited to mildly derogatory judgements or ‘absurdifying’ mockery. After a while, my initial disappointment turned into puzzlement and I started asking myself why such a grandly advertised and generously funded event reverberated so opaquely in the area.
Due to the fact that my fieldwork was largely limited to one particular neighbourhood I am in a poor position to evaluate in detail the impact of the 800th anniversary on the wider population of the city. However, it was clear that engagement varied across the city, and that the project seemed to resonate particularly weak amongst the people of Äussere Neustadt. To the extent it did appear here, it seemed to be as various alternative narratives of history. This gives rise to a series of questions of sociotemporal variation: Why did the NeustädterInnen identify so poorly with the jubilee? Why was ignorance the reaction of choice? When it was referred, why was ironic degradation the typical style? What do these reactions tell us of a historical consciousness amongst the inhabitants of the area? Were there alternate historical narratives pervading the neighbourhood? If so, how were they structured?
To understand indigenous identification between locality and history in contemporary Äussere Neustadt it is first crucial to examine some particular local historical events following in the wake of die Wende, which have come to dominate the image of the neighbourhood to such an extent that I will argue they have achieved a mythic stature. Questioning whether the prevalence of a particular local historical consciousness can be identified, I will examine an example of how a long time local resident referred and conceptualized local history in relation to the 800-years
celebration. Wrapping up the chapter, I will examine some celebratory practices through which processes of localizing, maintaining and elaborating a distinct historical narrative of the neighbourhood seemed to revolve.
Bitter-sweet resistance and the birth of an origin myth
The broad literature on post-socialism has shown that for vast numbers of people living within the former eastern bloc, die Wende was not merely a political, but also a major social and cultural transition that caused deep ruptures in a vast array of social spheres (Verdery 1996, Behrdahl 2000, Hann 2002). Times of intensified social transition usually give rise to heightened retrospective attention, becoming subjected to prolonged and expansive social remembering. Lasting celebration, debate and conflict is the ambiguous mnemonic legacy of most historical revolutions. It is therefore unsurprising that die Wende is still a prevalent theme; both in private and public spheres of life in the former GDR, and that it will probably remain so in the foreseeable future. It is important here to remind the reader that, in the memories of eastern German people, die Wende has a myriad of local geographical reference points, and, thus, is represented by much more than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Within the collective memories of particular social groups, die Wende acquires spatial significance in relation to many other places (whether buildings or areas), such as the Nikolai-church in Leipzig8 and Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin9. In many cases it is the events in these local places which define die Wende’s most significant imprints on the works of social memory. This is particularly true where people lean on spatial
8 Throughout the 1980s, congregations gathered here regularly to pray and at the same time express their opposition to the regime, inspiring the national church-based opposition which brought on the nationwide Monday demonstration movement.
A “peace column” has been raised here in memory if the events.
9 Large groups of punks who moved into this area in the wake of the fall of the wall, occupying the empty housing of the area. This led to an immediate period of increased unrest and various clashes with the police. Punk subculture still co- memorate these events through films and music.
belonging for personal identification. Where identity merges with place, the remembrance of local history intermingles significantly in processes of defining self and ‘other’. We shall now, therefore, ground die Wende as a local historical event of Äussere Neustadt.
In the 1980s, empty housing increased in Äussere Neustadt due to the decaying sanitary standards of the century-old building mass and the attraction of newly built Plattenbauten10 (see chapter 1). Jana Urbank shows how this opened a free-space in Dresden, which in turn attracted groups of people pursuing “alternative” lifestyles (see next chapter). Within the local youth-and-sports centre Martin-Andersen-Nexö, which today bears the name die Scheune (lit. “the barn”) and is the most prominent concert stage in the locality, a grass-root network of rock groups, painters, songwriters, actors and writers developed (Urbank 34:2004). These groups were the local representatives of the intellectual current of leftist opposers-of-the-state in East Germany, who not so much envisioned a unified Germany as the creation of a democratically reformed, socialist GDR state.
A range of Wende-analysts have shown how the East German reformist movement was both marginal and immature, unprepared and out of touch with the general popular sentiment of the time (Huyssen 1991, Lewis 1992, Joppke 1995). Thus, it was unable to effect their wanted reform and preserve GDR sovereignty. The sudden turn of events in 1989/90 and the following reunion caused widespread confusion and disappointment amongst east-German intellectuals, as well as a sense of bitter apathy due to their inability to influence the political development.
In Äussere Neustadt in the summer of 1990, a group of people belonging to the aforementioned local alternative scene responded with humour to the unpredicted transition by organizing a neighbourhood festival around an ironic proclamation of the city part as Bunte Republik Neustadt (“colourful republic New Town”)11. The
10 Modern east-block style prefabricated buildings.
11 The following information stems largely from the first issue of the Schild Zeitung, discussed and elaborated through talks with long-time residents.
name was a playful distortion of the abbreviation of the newly united Germany (BRD,
“Bundesrepublik Deutschlands” - BRN). It was celebrated the weekend of the union of the two separate east/west-currencies into one currency, the D-mark, signifying a protest against the imposition of a new macro-political structure replacing that which had fallen. For the festival, a provisional government consisting of a cabinet of 12 ministers, bearing satirical assignments such as “minister of un-culture and submarines” and “minister of occasions of insubordination”, was appointed. In a public ceremony in front of die Scheune, one of the cabinet members was appointed as “monarch without portfolio”. The provisional government crafted a humorous list of anti-political decrees such as “Decree nr. 1 of peace”, stating that:
“In the total territory of BRN, as well as in a radius of 40076, 6 km12 around the BRN, production, carrying, use and sale of weapons is strictly forbidden.”
, or the third decree of “human rights”, implementing the UN human rights, whilst supplementing the 24. article (right to recreation and spare time) with the following expansion:
“Every human has the right to laziness. Every human has the right to sleep out properly.”
The decrees were sent to the city council, inviting the mayor to come on a diplomatic visit in an atmosphere of friendship and mutual respect (which he actually did!).
Within the merry festival-atmosphere, the combination of neighbourhood romantics and the mocking spirit also produced a theatre (Projecttheater), a local currency (Neustadt Mark) as well as a newspaper (Schild Zeitung).
The festival had a large local appeal, leading to the organization of the second BRN- festival already in the fall of the same year. In the following years the celebration of BRN has become an annual tradition which has exploded in magnitude. Nevertheless,
12 = the circumference of the earth.
soon after the BRN of 1993, the king abdicated and the ministry was dissolved because they felt the original intent and feeling of the festival had become corrupted by foreign elements. Onwards throughout the 1990s, different local groups have tried to fill the role as BRN-supervisors, but most have pulled out after one or two years of involvement. Apart from the fact that BRN today has come to attract a stupendous amount of various interested actors, it seems as if any attempt to centralize the management of the festival is hindered by the fact that it would impede the principles of creativity, chaos, dissent and opposition inherent in the humorous ideology, which has formed the basic structure of BRN-conduct.
Thus, the organization of the BRN festival has moved from centralized supervision to de-centralized co-ordination through overlapping networks of private entrepreneurs and various local and regional interest groups. In 2001 and 2002, a set of violent clashes between police and erratic groups of radical leftist youth, variously termed Linken, Autonomen and Punks in local discourse, led to outcries from city politicians to impose stronger measures of control on the festival. Thus, in the latest years the state police has increased its supervising presence. Recent years BRN has gathered up to 200 000 people from all over Germany and even from abroad, becoming one of the biggest out-door events in the country. Its popular image is reproduced through practices which attempt to imitate the particular spirit conceptualized through the imagining of the events of Äussere Neustadt in the summer of 1990, the first BRN- festival remaining the key historical point of reference.
Through the annual BRN-festival, the historical narrative of BRN anno 1990 is variously reaffirmed so that myth of origin is moulded and reproduced in processes of introspective historical narration. Later in this chapter I give some concrete examples of contemporary BRN practices, following Connerton’s point that social remembering happens through ritual performance (1989:59). Now we shall leave BRN for a moment and turn back to the 800-years celebration to examine how historical narration also can arise dialectically in relation to other such narratives.
Managing a myth. A grass root NGO.
“Archaeologists date the findings of the river front of
contemporary Neustadt, which confirm the earliest settlements, to around 2500 BC. Therefore we can with right confirm for the later city “Old Dresden” and the contemporary Neustadt that we can be proud of a more than 4000 year long history of settlement. ‘We’ received the right as city in 1403, which again was withdrawn in 1549 because Mortiz, duke and Kurfürst of Saxony joined the two cities (incorporation)...
It’s a pity that our 600-year celebration in 2003 turned out so small that people hardly noticed it, or what?!”
- From 2006-calendar published by Republik Neustatt e.V.
Via local hearsay, I got related to and had several informal talks with Volker, the head of the volunteer neighbourhood NGO Republik Neustatt e.V. RN was founded in 2005 by half a dozen of young people related through a shared sense of Äussere Neustadt as Heimat13, as well as a feeling of unsettledness that certain post-Wende development trends in the neighbourhood threaten to its cultural uniqueness. Briefly summarized, these threats are represented by foreign elements, such as commercial enterprises, noisy, party-minded youngsters from the neighbouring city parts, and inquisitive tourists, all parts of the gentrification of the area during the latest 15 years.
Their response was to organize various neighbourhood initiatives and campaigns, such as distributing questionnaires in local Kneipen, administering web-sites for public discussions, arranging sports tournaments, distributing t-shirts and sweaters advertising local pride, initiating demonstrations to extra-political involvement in the area, as well as actively engaging in the organization and administration of the BRN- festival.
13 This term, literally meaning “home”, springs out of German romanticism. It is somewhat stronger and has an air of mysticism to it, referring to the existence of an essential bond between an individual and a place (usually the place of birth).
The members were handling the fact that their neighbourhood necessarily would be in flux due to its popularity pragmatically; nevertheless they saw it as their mission to act as caretakers of the local residents and preserve its unique, authentic culture and atmosphere, ensuring that the changes did not destroy it. Hence, they for example spoke of their work as “development aid”, as in their recently proclaimed declaration of the Unabhängigen Nordunion (UN) (“Independent Northunion”), an initiative whereby they wanted to monitor and intervene in the preparation and celebration of the BRN-festival. An excerpt from the declaration reads: “The ideal is to associate a traditional, multicultural and (at once) typical party by and for the Neustädter/Innen14, even with the influences of today.”15. Note also how this initiative connects to the tradition of political satiric expression, masking a message of local autonomy; the abbreviation UN is a play on the name of the United Nations.
The fact that the prominent old town of Dresden is located on the south side of the river whilst Äussere Neustadt is located on the north side suggests that the humorous label “Independent Northunion” is part of the reconstruction of a divisive south-north relationship which works metonymically to strengthen the imagined conception of Äussere Neustadt as a radically different place.
One afternoon in early June I went to a local Kneipe called Groove Station to meet Volker. He had from the beginning been open and interested in my project, probably seeing a chance to influence my research through his engagement with the neighbourhood. I had been invited to come to Groove Station this evening to attend an informal public session where agents who wished to set up private arrangements on the streets to the coming BRN-festival could report their idea and receive counselling. Although holding no formal authority, Volker had been in dialogue with the public authorities and acquired knowledge of the formal rules regulating the use of public space during the festival. Through the counselling he got an overview over a selection of grass-root BRN-projects, and had a chance to influence the individual
14 Men and women living in Äussere Neustadt.
15 http://www.mobilmachung.com/brn/downloads/text06.pdf
organizers with his views on how to best set up their projects. Volker was, as so often, dressed in one of the black hooded sweaters that RN had gotten manufactured, sporting various prints playing on the image of the neighbourhood. This one showed several simple, iconographic figures, one swaggering drunkenly through the streets with a beer bottle in the hands, one puking, an third littering, all set within a red circle with a wry line drawn across so as to resemble a prohibition sign, gross fonts reading:
“NO PROLL16-TOURISTS IN DIE NEUSTADT”. A similar logo was seen on a sticker on his wallet.
Discrediting the grand historical narrative – For whom is history written?
On the topic of the 800-years celebration, Volker immediately expressed negatively, emphasising that its budget of 3 million Euros could have been much better spent. In his view, this money should have rather been distributed across the various existing Dresden cultural initiatives, rather than on grand projects organized by the state. His call was for a cultural politics calling for a stronger bottom-up thinking. When I mentioned the argument widely agreed on in media that the 800-years celebration would stimulate Dresden’s economy through image building and attraction of more tourists, he expressed disbelief, stating that it would all be passing by in a flash to be forgotten again next year. According to Volker, the national image of Dresden rested on the baroque buildings in the old town, like Frauenkirch and Semperoper, whose market value would remain more or less the same regardless of the 800-years festivities.
16 Proll derives from the word “proletarian”, and is today used as a socially derogatory term to denote people who are seen as uncivilised/uncultured. In this case, “Proll-tourists” refers to the masses of youth coming to the area in the weekends to take part in the extensive night-life.
Volker also referred to the city authorities sponsoring the celebration as “[those] on the other side [of the river]”. Asking him to elaborate this differentiation, he plunged into a historical narrative reminiscent in the quote opening this chapter, emphasising how the new town and the old town were originally two separate settlements. He explained that the old town rulers had incorporated the new town only towards the end of medieval times, when it had grown into a notable trading outpost. After having explained that recent archaeology has uncovered traces of human settlement at the northern side of die Elbe tracing back more than 3000 years17, he pointed to historical evidence showing that a germanic new town was founded only at the start of the 15th century. Somewhat bitterly, he then added that there had been an attempt to create a 600-years celebration in 2003, which, in contrast to this year’s celebration, had received hardly any public notice.
Volker did not question the historical facts presented in the city-authorized 800-years celebration as such. He did, however, show a strong awareness of how history is written through processes of selection, often used by elites to fortify their position and influence. For him, the 800-years celebration was much more than just a question of history; it was an example of how the city government coupled with big capital to stage an event where history was used by the old town bourgeoisie and the tourism industries to mask their real interests of power and profit. This again brought up his general distaste for the extensive commercial expansion in the city, which stemmed from his experience of the post-Wende transformation of Äussere Neustadt. He thus reacted and rebelled to the perceived effort of essentialising whole Dresden into one historical image by consciously tapping disjunctive historical facts to create alternative counter-narratives, highlighting internal difference in opposition to wholeness.
Volker’s local historical perceptions intertwined with certain of his contemporary long time co-residents, who were engaged in constructing a distinct neighbourhood
17 Strands of Slavic peoples, expelled during the Germanic migrations in the 7th and 8th centuries.
temporal image by gathering and presenting historical facts that documented the neighbourhood past. Examples are the recent IG Äussere Neustadt e.V.18s’
publication of a book with photography of the past, portraying its architectural diversity and development through the last century, as well as a semi-regular column in the local newspaper die Neustädter of small, unknown stories dug out of the vaults of the city archives. The general ignorance of the 800-years celebration can be partially explained in this tendency of a rather narrow local historical focus. Silence works as a passive form of opposition, whose expression is indirectly out-spoken through alternate memory works.
BRN - An alternative historical celebration
“(...) whenever the social institutions for which
‘old’ traditions were designed begin to crumble under the impact of rapid social change,
a widespread and instant invention of new rituals occurs.”
- Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember
After 1990, the BRN-festival soon developed into an local institution. That it will take place every year on a weekend in the middle of June is an unquestionable part of public awareness. Large parts of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants spend significant amounts of time in preparation, some starting as early as in the winter to plan their projects. Actors vary from private households to various commercial agents (shops, cafés, bars etc.), local or extra-local. Although commercial activities pervade contemporary BRN-festivals on all levels, I will here, first and foremost, focus on the
18 Another local volunteer organization, founded in 1989 with an aspiration to work for the preservation of the historical gründerzeit-architecture in the city part.
non-commercial traits of two of locally initiated projects in the 2006 BRN. The reason is that it is in these that attempts to connect with the 1990 BRN are most explicit. The increasing commerciality is interpreted by many residents as a degradation of the original event, thus representing a factor of pollution. Using the event for money- making is seen as cynical exploiting of the perceived true idealistic spirit of the model happening. I will return to the tense debate regarding the essence, purity and authenticity of the city part in the next chapter. Here I will illustrate how locally initiated projects strived, in form and structure, to imitate the model-BRN of 1990, and thus can broadly be seen as ‘ritual re-enactments’ (Connerton 1989:53) commemorating the particular neighbourhood history.
Seasonal inversions
One evening at the end of February, my flat-mate Johann, the 22-year-old student of landscape architecture, came home excitedly telling of how he and a friend had figured out that they wanted to set up a venue selling Glühwein for this year’s BRN.
Glühwein (lit. “glow-wine”) is a traditional German spicy, heated, red wine, served as a warming drink in the winter season, typically at the famous Christmas markets that pop up in cities and villages around the country in the Advent season. The amusing point was the idea of setting up a Glühwein-stand selling heated drinks in the middle of June, a season which rather encouraged cooling drinks. Spinning along on this idea, my other neighbour, Robert, suggested, with a chuckle supplementing, the stand with Christmas cakes. As Glühwein is mainly sold in the winter season, a trip to the mall was organized within a few weeks to purchase 30 litres of the wine for storage before it went out of sale.
Up until BRN, the idea reshaped and crystallised in a spontaneous manner, as more people got involved and the practical circumstances became clearer. One friend organized for a plastic Christmas tree which it was agreed would be “planted” in a small, inflatable children’s swimming pool. It was also suggested to decorate the tree
with various items, such as Easter eggs, snow spray and rubbish, but eventually none got around to do this. Other friends contributed with an electrical stove, some furniture and a music rack. In informal afternoon gatherings, people discussed various suggestions for a name for the stand, ending up with “Boiling hot Glüh- punch, BRN Vorglüh-oasis” (Vorglüh signalled that it was a place of “warming up”
for the festival). Johann took charge of the painting of a poster for the stand. Having acquired a large piece of tapestry from his school, he set about using a crude set of bright blue, green, red and yellow water-based colours. As it was lain out in the hall of our flat during the week before the BRN, different visitors added creative hands to the production. Thus, in the end, it displayed a naively styled desert-oasis scenery with a green, blue-humped camel, elk horns (associating it with Rudolf the Reindeer), and a police-badge across the trunk eating colourful juggling balls. In the sky above, a sun with sunglasses smilingly sent its rays across the scenery whilst puffing on a tuba-shaped marijuana joint.
The BRN-Vorglüh-oasis poster
In the staging of the stand, the project took an unprecedented turn as the house owner, a private extra-local property firm, suddenly issued that they did not want the common area of their premise to be used for any public BRN-purpose. The stated reason was to avoid disturbance of the residents and damage to the property. Thus, Johann and his circle of friends were forced to reorganize the project as a private, back yard party on the opening afternoon of the festival. Nevertheless, they defied the